MK Partners News

Real Capital Markets, a company that provides custom web marketing, a Virtual Deal Room®, and qualified principal/buyer database for the commercial real estate industry, has selected MK Partners to optimize its use of salesforce.com. Real Capital Markets came to MK Partners because it felt it was not leveraging the full functionality of salesforce.com. Specifically, MK Partners will focus on modifying salesforce.com to better help Real Capital Markets track and monitor the tasks and data associated with its sales funnel, pending deals, and automate the ability to process service agreements within salesforce.com.

MK Partners is excited to bring Real Capital Markets the results it seeks and welcome them to the long list of businesses who have relied on MK Partners to better enhance their processes and service.

Starting next week, MK Partners will be hosting monthly giveaways for our loyal blog readers. Once a month, on a random day, we will have a post detailing the prize and what you need to do to enter. The prizes will at first consist of licenses for our products, but we are actively working on getting our partners to participate too. The details on what you have to do to enter will be in the blog post.

For this first giveaway, we’re going to give you some extra hints. The post will be published on Wed 3/10 at 8am PST. In order to enter you will have to be one of the first 10 people to comment on the post. The prize will be a 1 year org-wide license to our latest product Who’s Money?, a $500 value. Who’s Money? is an automated calculation engine that will let you see how many Opportunities (Donations or Gifts) are related to a Contact and how many dollars they are worth. The product uses the very latest features in salesforce.com that came out in the Spring ‘10 release.

For more information about Who’s Money? visit our new products page at www.mkpartners.com/products-services

Whipple Russell Architects, an architecture firm, has selected MK Partners to optimize its use of salesforce.com. Without a dedicated IT staff, Whipple Russell Architects came to MK Partners to leverage the full functionality of salesforce.com. Specifically, MK Partners  employed a Consulting On-Demand solution to sync MS Outlook with salesforce.com and developed web-to-lead forms so Whipple Russell Architects could better manage its correspondence and generate more leads.

With our Consulting On-Demand package, organizations contact an MK Partners salesforce.com expert as needed to implement immediate solutions to salesforce.com obstacles.

MK Partners is excited to bring Whipple Russell Architects the results it seeks and welcomes them to the long list of businesses who have relied on MK Partners to better enhance their processes and services.

Salesforce.com has two in person events coming up in the next few months. If you’re an experienced Administrator that wants to start building out custom functionality, we recommend the Admin to Hero Roadshow. If you’re brand new and don’t really know where to start then the Cloudforce 2 Essentials is a good place. Here are the details.

Admin to Hero Roadshow: Free Force.com training session
Mar 16, 2010
9am or 1pm
salesforce.com
900 Concar Dr
San Mateo, CA 94402

Cloudforce 2 Essentials: Sacramento
Apr 8, 2010

Hyatt Regency – Sacramento
1209 L Street
Sacramento, CA 95814

MK Partners is proud to announce that we have a new Contact Us page on our website. Our former Contact Us page was a web-to-lead form that submitted new leads directly into our salesforce org. It was very good at what it did, but we really needed a more powerful page.

Our new Contact Us page is powered by force.com Sites and it does much more than just enter leads into salesforce. The new page dynamically changes the questions on the screen based on why you are contacting us. If you’re contacting us for product support it you have to fill out questions related to the issue. If you’re contacting us for sales you have to fill out questions related to your project. But wait, there’s more, not only do the questions on the screen change, but the resulting record in salesforce changes too. Support inquiries turn into cases and sales inquiries turn into leads!

We fell this upgrade is is long overdue for us, not only because we are such proponents of using force.com Sites but also because it improves our efficiency and helps us respond faster to support requests.

If you’re interested in having MK Partners create a custom force.com Sites powered page for your website, fill out our Contact Us form at http://www.mkpartners.com/contact

In the last week both Google and Salesforce.com have made announcements that they will stop supporting IE 6.0 later this year. While the two companies have close ties, this doesn’t appear to be an attack on Microsoft but rather just a push to take advantage of the latest (and future) web technologies which IE 6.0 doesn’t support.

Even though the announcement states that the change will not occur until the end of 2010, some users on IE 6.0 have already reported minor issues since the Spring ‘10 release. Our guess is that these issues will be fixed with a maintenance release over the next few weeks, something that is common after a major salesforce.com release.

Over the next year, prior to the official desupport of IE 6.0, Salesforce.com will be releasing some pilot enhancements which require an explicit opt-in. This may explain why the new look and feel demonstrated at Dreamforce is not generally available yet. Salesforce.com has stated that it will be made available after all servers have been upgraded to the Spring release, scheduled to occur this weekend.

What browser do you use? Let us know in the comments.

MK Partners is extremely please that Invisible Children, one of our clients, was recently voted to the top of the Chase Community Giving List. As the winner of the contest. Invisible Children will receive 1 Million dollars from Chase to further their mission.

We worked very closely with Invisible Children last year to implement salesforce.com to manage their inventory and touring educational groups. Their implementation has been extremely effective and was even featured at Dreamforce ‘09.

You can learn more about Invisible Children and they great work they do at their website www.invisiblechildren.com.

MK Partners is extremely please that the executive director of one of our clients recently won an Ashoka Fellowship. The lucky winner is Chris Balme of Spark. Spark is the only youth empowerment program in the country that addresses the dropout crisis by re-engaging at-risk students through hands-on, individualized apprenticeships.

We worked very closely with Chris last year to fully power and integrate their website’s online giving portal with salesforce.com. The portal has been a huge success and was even adopted by one of Spark’s sister organizations.

You can learn more about Spark and they great work they do at their website sparkprogram.org.

Way to go Chris!

If you visit salesforce.com/events you may be disappointed by the lack of events going on in North America right now. It’s not even a search option! Fortunately, salesforce.com/community has its own events page which does have a list of web-based events that do occur during North American business hours. One of which is coming up next week and sounds perfect for beginner to intermediate admins struggling with data issues. The webinar is being given by two salesforce.com employees and doesn’t mention any partners, so it should be a little less biased than a Dreamforce session.

For more details visit salesforce.com/community and click on the events link in the sidebar

Salesforce.com is holding a webinar titled “Beyond virtualization: revolutionizing application design” on January 28, 2010 at 10:00 a.m. PT. David Claiborne and Peter Coffee will be speaking. Details below.

For all its benefits, virtualization doesn’t move beyond the boundaries of traditional IT data “silos.” But forward-looking CIOs and developers are going much further, by building new highly-connected systems in the cloud.
Learn about the application design revolution that’s unleashing tremendous business value—join us for this next Cloud Computing Uncovered Webinar, and discover:

• Virtualization’s current state of play on desktops and in data centers
• Why multi-tenancy gives you more security, reliability, and elasticity
• Collaborative power tools for individuals and enterprises, from Google Docs to Salesforce-to-Salesforce

And don’t miss Peter Coffee’s monthly mythbuster: “Is virtualization the key to the cloud?” Discover the advantages of making your next IT initiative truly new vs. merely more efficient.
Register now